To be recognized as a feminist is to be assigned to a difficult category and a category of difficulty. You are “already read” as “not easy to get along with” when you name yourself as a feminist. You have to show that you are not difficult through displaying signs of good will and happiness. Frye alludes to such experiences when she describes how: “this means, at the very least, that we may be found to be “difficult” or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost one’s livelihood.”1 We can also witness an investment in feminist unhappiness (the myth that feminists kill joy because they are joy-less). There is a desire to believe that women become feminists because they are unhappy. This desire functions as a defense of happiness against feminist critique. This is not to say that feminists might not be unhappy; becoming a feminist might mean becoming aware of just how much there is to be unhappy about. Feminist consciousness could be understood as consciousness of unhappiness, a consciousness made possible by the refusal to turn away. My point here would be that feminists are read as being unhappy, such that situations of conflict, violence, and power are read as about the unhappiness of feminists, rather than being what feminists are unhappy about.
Political struggles can takes place over the causes of unhappiness. We need to give a history to unhappiness. We need to hear in unhappiness more than the negation of the “un.” The history of the word “unhappy” might teach us about the unhappiness of the history of happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy meant to cause misfortunate or trouble. Only later, did it come to mean to feel misfortunate, in the sense of wretched or sad. We can learn from the swiftness of translation from causing unhappiness to being described as unhappy. We must learn.
The word “wretched” has its own genealogy, coming from wretch, meaning a stranger, exile, banished person. Wretched in the sense of “vile, despicable person” was developed in Old English and is said to reflect “the sorry state of the outcast.” Can we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch? If we listen to those who are cast as wretched, perhaps their wretchedness would no longer belong to them. The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.
Phenomenology helps us explore how the familiar is that which is not revealed. A queer phenomenology shows how the familiar is not revealed to those who can inhabit it. For queers and other others the familiar is revealed to you, because you do not inhabit it. To be “estranged from” can be what enables a “consciousness of.” This is why being a killjoy can be a knowledge project, a world-making project.
- Frye, 2-3. [↩]
